


The Devil Is Wrong With Me?

by Immortalnite



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, Depression, Flashbacks, Hallucinations, Hell, Insomnia, M/M, Religion
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-28
Updated: 2016-06-27
Packaged: 2018-07-18 17:03:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7323532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Immortalnite/pseuds/Immortalnite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyler isn't a huge fan of high school. Who is, really? He doesn't really have any friends and he only likes one class, music theory. He doesn't really believe in heaven or hell, not after his life took a nosedive last year. But hey, sometimes it seems like maybe there is someone up there listening to him. Doing anything more than listening, though? Like maybe helping? Fuck nah, why would anyone help him out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Devil Is Wrong With Me?

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I'm not religious. At all. I've got a fair grasp on christianity tho don't worry m8 i got this

The insistent beeping of Tyler’s alarm dragged him to a hazy state of awareness that was awake, fifty percent asleep, and one hundred percent self hatred. He lay on his back for maybe ten minutes, maybe twenty, wondering why the hell the sun wasn’t polite enough to just be the fuck up when he was awake. Yanking his legs up out of bed, he stood up unsteadily, pressing a hand to the wall to keep his balance while blood rushed painfully to his head.

 

The bathroom was the door right next to his in the hallway, small and very messily kept. His father had his own bathroom on the other side of the house that was meticulously organised, but God knows that wasn’t Tyler’s style. He splashed some water on his face, rubbing at the rough, uneven skin across his forehead and glanced around blearily at the products scattered around the counters. He grabbed up a small disc of concealer and a brush, hastily painting on a little swipe of it under his eyes to hide the impressive eye bags he had going on. He tugged his shirt off and stared at the almost grotesque way his skin stretched and pooled around his frame. Disgusting, he thought to himself. He was absolutely disgusting.

 

Tossing the shirt back into a corner of his room with the rest of the dirty clothing he hadn’t washed yet, Tyler grabbed anew shirt and tugged it on over his head, grateful for the covering, however ill fitting the shirt was. He slid on some shoes, stuffing his phone into his back pocket and slinging the attached headphones around his neck. He didn’t bother to check for any text messages. He knew there wouldn’t be any. His backpack was on the floor, untouched from the previous day, ready to go. Tyler snatched it up, grinning a little as he walked out the door at a note from his father.

 

Once his dad had started working extra time, they’d begun to see each other less and less as his father had begun to sleep in more and come home later. Notes were mostly how they communicated in the morning, though they had made a point to have dinner together in the evening every day.

 

He picked up the pen lying on the counter top under the note and jotted back a quick ‘good morning’ to his father before heading out the front door. His school was a twenty minute walk from his house and Tyler was honestly kind of grateful for that. He put headphones in his ears and hit shuffle on his phone, squinting playfully at the east where the sky was just beginning to lighten into a pale salmon colour.

 

Mornings were nice. They were always tired, the refreshed tired after you wake up or the dragging tired of an all-nighter, tired like a new mother or tired like an elderly grandmother, tired like a mockingbird never was or tired like the doves always are. It was sort of a game for him to pick which type of tired the people he passed on the way to school were.

 

The fat kid who biked to school every morning to have groping make outs with his girlfriend in front of the cafeteria breakfast line was the sunshine mockingbird’s tired, far more energetic than necessary or appropriate at seven in the morning. The smirking man who carried about three more backpacks than he really needed and stood with a power that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the white house was the refreshed tired, glinting and steel coloured like a sharpened knife. The seniors, for the most part, were the bruise-purple all nighter’s tired, complete with the slightly maniacal glint in their eyes that they all got once midterms passed.

 

The stoner girl whose beat up pick up truck grumbled and coughed past him at the stoplight halfway between his house and the school was the olive grandmother’s tired, happy and slow, with surprising bits of wisdom in between puffs of smoke. The young woman who got up every morning to water her meager garden and wave to the jogger that passed her was the fading blue new mother’s tired, carrying on with her duties though everyone could see the toll her divorce was taking on her.

 

And Tyler? He liked to think of himself as the grey brown and pink dove’s tired, quiet and small, watching everyone from on top of the light posts and making timid noises, but never being noticed. Doves were so calm. They ‘had chill’, as his brother would have put it.

 

School did not have any chill. It never did. Apparently, some teenagers had gotten into a fight right in the bus circle this morning and Tyler could hear the shouting even before he turned the corner and saw the school. A hundred high schoolers, chanting together, administrators with megaphones trying to shout over them, teachers watching with intent disinterest from the sidewalk as two beefy guys attempted to clobber each other. He didn’t know what they were fighting over, and it didn’t really matter. At least they weren’t in the way of his first period class.

 

Tyler skirted around the skirmish, heading right for his first period class room. The warning bell hadn’t even rung yet, but his teacher always let students in early and it wasn’t like Tyler had any real friends to say good morning to anyway. He took his seat at the back table by himself and tossed his bag carelessly on the table, yanking out a sketchbook from it.

 

The class was an accelerated course, just like all his core classes were, but it was still easy enough for him that he didn’t really need to pay attention to do well. That, and the teacher was fucking stupid.

 

He stared down the blank page in his sketchbook, waiting for an idea to come to mind. The only one that did was the Eye. He sighed quietly and tried to think of anything else other than the Eye. He had a lot of drawings of it anyway, he didn’t really need another one. But he couldn’t, so he just started on the familiar outline of it. One curved line across the top, one curved line across the bottom. Add an eyelid. Now the cornea and an iris. Smudge the lines so they blend between the two. No eye lashes. Blend shadows around the edges. Smudge all the lines so they’re out of focus.

 

He was halfway through with the smudging when the teacher slapped a stapled pack of paper down on his desk. Tyler startled and looked up at her but she had already turned away to give the next table their assignment. Shaking his head a little and cracking his knuckles, Tyler stowed the packet in his bag and looked up at the clock. The bell would ring in three… two… one. And he was out. One period down, six more to go.

 

In all honesty, the only period that Tyler didn’t totally hate was fourth period, and lunch to some extent. Fourth period was his required fine arts class, and he had picked music theory.

 

“Hey, Tyler. How’s your day?” Mr. Thomas smiled at him as he walked through the door.

 

“Boring. How’s yours?” He grinned back a little lopsided smile and took a seat on the left side of the third tier of the room. The music theory class was in the same one as band, so it had that clamshell set up around the director’s podium and the chalkboard.

 

“Good, good.” Mr. Thomas muttered as he walked up to the front of the class. He picked up a piece of yellow chalk and began to write SIMPLE METERS in large, thin letters across the top of the board. That was good. Tyler was pretty good at time signatures and tempos, probably largely due to counting out taps on the desk when he was feeling anxious. He felt anxious a lot.

 

The class started quietly, students spread out around the shell of the room in little clusters no bigger than three, using the stands as a desk to write on. Mr. Thomas was steadily filling the board up with yellow chalk and subdivided measures, his baritone voice making Tyler feel almost drowsy.

 

"…give us an example, Tyler?"

 

Tyler’s head jerked up. Shit. Okay, maybe he was a little more than 'almost drowsy'. His eyes darted to the board, then back to Mr. Thomas's face.

 

"Uh, 2/2?" He said tentatively.

 

A bemused smirk crept across his teacher's face. "Yes, that's right. Cut time is a simple duple meter. Maybe in the future we could try to stay awake in class?" Tyler sucked his head sharply, flushing a little.

 

When the bell rang that dismissed his class to go to lunch, Mr. Thomas called him over.

 

"Hey, man, what's going on? Usually you don't use my class for sleeping."

 

Tyler shrugged, scratching at the back of his neck. "I, uh, didn't sleep well last night. It won't happen again, I'm sorry."

 

"Hey, no, don't apologise. I just wanted to make sure you're ok and all, if you wanna crash in the back of the room or something I'll make sure you're awake when the bell rings." Thomas shrugged.

 

Tyler hesitated for a moment, then shook his head and smiled weakly. "I appreciate the offer, but no thanks." Shouldering his bag, he nodded once more to his teacher and headed resolutely towards the cafeteria and the lunch line's toxic food.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

By the time seventh period rolled around, Tyler was seriously considering sleeping medications. He'd reached the point of tired where his eyes seemed dry and stuck open but anytime he managed to get them closed, he seemed to almost instantly fall into a twisted, nonsensical unreality.

 

Walls started to spin, faces twisted and blurred and hazy shapes moulded into tunnel vision. Tyler could almost feel the hallucinations coming at this point. It wasn't exactly that he wasn't sleeping at night, because he was, it was more that he wasn't sleeping _well_. It was restless for him, shallow and unsatisfying, and it never felt like he had even slept it all. And then in the morning he'd get up and skip coffee so by the afternoon his body had literally nothing to function on.

 

His gaze snapped over to a bug on the wall behind the teacher, a bug that was crawling and crawling and crawling but never moving from it's place five inches away from the projector screen. He tried to glance at his teacher, but his eyes seemed to trip over themselves and everything spun out of focus for a second. When the world righted itself again, the thing standing at the front of the room wasn't Tyler's teacher anymore.

 

He knew what it was right away, the black humanoid form that had replaced his history teacher. He could never make out any part of the face of the thing, it was just a blur of grey and black, except for the one eye. The Eye was abnormally large, too large for any human, and a light brown colour. Tyler often jokingly called it the Eye of Sauron, but there really was nothing funny about it when it was here. He felt like it could see into his soul, read his thoughts and intentions. The Eye knew Tyler better than Tyler did.

 

The voice of the teacher was an unintelligible low him behind his ears and Tyler forced himself to look down at his desk, away from the blurry faced shadow man and the Sisyphus bug. He could feel the gaze of the Eye burning into him, but he forced himself to remain still and not flinch away or look away.

 

When the bell rang, Tyler was the first one out of the room. The shadow man watched him go, unmoving, and he was grateful that at least this one time his hallucinations decided to stay put and not follow him. Tyler's walk home was tense, every ten steps had him checking over his shoulder for any read or imagined tail. As soon as he got home, he locked the front door, stumbled into his room, and fell asleep on his bed still fully dressed.

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

_"Tyler, put your seatbelt on." Kelly glanced at him through the rear view mirror._

 

_"Yeah Tyler, put your seatbelt on." His brother parroted back, poking his cheek playfully._

 

_"Moooom! Tell Zack to get off me!"_

 

_"Zack, get off your brother or I'll have you switch places with Madison in the back."_

 

_A cry of indignation came from the third row. "Mom! I don't wanna sit with Tyler and Jay! Boys are gross!"_

 

_"Everybody settle down, please. Let's play the quiet game for the next five minutes." Tyler's dad suggested from the driver's seat._

 

_The light ahead of the car turned green and Zack, being the somewhat childish trickster that he was, whooped as the car went forward._

 

_Then the car jerked violently and it went black._

 

 

* * *

 

 

 

Tyler sat bolt upright, sweat coating his forehead and his heart pounding against his ribcage.

 

_"It was a broadside collision, a semi ran a red light and hit them head-on."_

 

Tyler's fingernails scraped at his scalp as he clutched his hands over his ears to block the memories.

 

_"The vehicle hit the passenger side, killed the mom, daughter and two of the teenage boys instantly."_

 

He could feel the sharp-sweet, blue-green smell of the hospital permeating his senses. It almost hurt. He hated the smell of hospitals, hated them so, so much.

 

_"What about the father and the other teenage son?"_

 

He could feel the horrible restraints of the ambulance gurney pinning him down and, with an inaudible scream, he tore the sheets off himself, thrashing and shaking.

 

_"Oh them? They're both in critical, the boy stayed conscious through the whole accident, poor dear. I think they've put him to sleep by now, but I swear the whole ward could hear him screaming when he came in."_

 

Zack's eyes, wide and surprised and so very much like his own, swam across his mind.

 

_"Do you think they'll survive? It was a nasty crash."_

 

Tyler's throat felt raw and everything was shaking.

 

_"I think they'll be able to go home, if that's what you're asking. Will they be okay, though? I can't say."_

 

Tyler's alarm clock went off.


End file.
